“Some of my favourite things in life – peonies, puffins, mangoes – are all seasonal joys, and I await their return each year. I’m learning how to let writing also be part of that chorus, so that I can relish it when it happens, and trust that it will return again.” – Shambhawi Tripathi

“For a long time, I felt trapped in academic writing. As I began experimenting with creative writing, I discovered that it offers simple and concrete techniques to invigorate writing practices without sacrificing the precision of our findings.” – Marie Beauchamps

You don’t want the reader to be able to see your development as a writer as they read through your thesis; you want there to be a consistent voice that runs throughout. In your read-through for voice, then, what you want to do is pick up on where needs some more polishing from a consistency perspective…

“I don’t write every day, but on some days, writing is the only thing that I do. There aren’t enough of those days though.” – Rahul Rao

I was invited to offer some tips for navigating academia as an early career researcher for the wonderful 'Making Space in International Studies' workshop, and I thought my reflections might be useful for a wider audience, so I wrote my notes up and expanded on them a little into this very blog. Enjoy!

The idea of signposting is that you’re telling the reader where they’re going, and where they can find all the important things. You’re reminding them of what they’ve already read, and giving them advance notice of things they are going to come across soon…

“I’m starting to feel more at ease disrupting the disciplinary confines of academic writing and exploring new forms of expression.” – Lucy Hall

You’ll see lots of writing productivity tips out there. I have probably read all of these tips and tried to follow those routines myself. But what seems to happen is it works for a week, maybe, and then I spend the following week on the sofa thinking that I’ve used up all my words and they’ll never come back. This is a problem because my entire income is based on me either writing words or fixing words other people have written. I need the words to stay with me…

When it comes to writing or editing your dissertation, your style guide is your secret weapon for consistency. It will help you get your dissertation looking great, from the very first word of your title page to the very last word of your appendix.

I really enjoy working collaboratively. But when it came to my relationship with words? I was a sucky collaborator. And then recently, in my trusty research journal, I found myself writing two questions : ‘What if my writing and I worked together?’ and ‘How can I be a good collaborator for/with my writing?

It’s common for supervisors to say: ‘It’s now time to edit your dissertation’, and for you to think: ‘Great!’ and then really soon after ‘But what does that even mean?’. Copy-editing and proofreading your dissertation are some of the most important things you will do before it goes off to the examiner, which makes knowing how to edit your dissertation crucial.

“I find pleasure, and feel excitement that I might get to spend a few hours of my day just noodling, shifting words around, finding satisfying arrangements that sound nice when you read them out loud.” – Eda Gunaydin

Permission to replace my academic writing routine with a more flexible toolkit? Yes, please and thank you very much.

Recently I was sketching out my monthly schedule and as I was blocking time out to do some writing on a journal article, I gave an involuntary ‘urgh’. And then I thought: ‘huh. Where did that come from?’…

“While writing, I pretend that I can lovingly offer time respite, demand that it stops and rests for a little while; I ask it to pause and sit with me, let the minutes and hours soak in words: where they come from, where they go, how they’re spoken, how we texture their histories with voices of our own.” – Q Manivannan

Each section of your dissertation has a particular job to do. And you can help the writing process along by putting on different ‘hats’ or personas depending on which section you are writing. Here are the five that I’ve come up with…

“Writing is not about waiting for a muse or a divine burst of creativity. It is getting words on a page and finishing something you set out to do as best you can.” – Megan MacKenzie

“For the past few years, I have lived by Scottish rivers, first the Allan water in Dunblane and now the river Eden in Fife. Walking beside these rivers sets a rhythm to my day. These walks are reliable. They happen whether I am having a good writing day or a terrible one. That reliability lends a cadence to my days.” - Roxani Krystalli

Welcome to Part 2 of the two-part blog on what I would do differently if I had my PhD time again. In this blog, I share the things that I did but wish I had done sooner, including being strategic about professional opportunities, making peace with the messiness of the thinking-writing-editing process, and getting a PhD squad.